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"Sweden's government is in crisis after a government agency accidentally leaked the
entire country's personal details database by offshoring its storage without adequate
safeguards. Two ministers have been fired and the entire government may fall."

"Spectacular as it is, the Swedish disaster is just the latest in a seemingly unending
series of similar catastrophes of which the OPM records loss , Snowden defection, State
Dept secret cable loss, NSA toolkit theft are but a few well known examples. The
casualties flash past like milestones in a blur. Britain's NHS lost 100,000 patient records
the other day. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lost his job today due to
"documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm" proving he was corrupt. In an age
where the media use unnamed sources to launder leaks and section 702 of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act is allegedly used for political surveillance no one's secrets
are safe. We appear to have entered the age of digital nakedness and not even
politicians are immune."

"It's entirely possible that, despite their show of outward confidence no one fully
understands the changes we've unleashed, least of all politicians nurtured in
bureaucracy. The death of privacy appears to be an externality of the information age
just as pollution was the unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. Nobody
knows how much it will cost and the elite doesn't know how to deal with it."

Your social security number probably got leaked and that’s very, very bad:

"The Equifax hack exposed more than 100 million people to the worst kind of identity
theft.

Corporate hacks and data breaches happen pretty frequently. Target accidentally gave
up our credit card info, then some jerks swiped our email data from Yahoo!. The recent
data breach from credit bureau Equifax, however, is different. The scope is staggering,
involving over 100 million people. Even more troubling is the fact that social security
numbers are included in the leaked data. You can change your email password and get a
new credit card, but changing your SSN is a painstaking and often expensive process
that can ripple through your entire life."

"The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics,
entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are
being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.

The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in
which tax abuses can thrive – and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the
wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth."

"As part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ) investigation
into the Paradise Papers, the organization found information last week on Dragon Ball
manga creator Akira Toriyama's offshore investments.

The Japanese news agency Kyodo reported on November 5 that Toriyama was one of 12
Japanese people who invested in a U.S. real estate company in 2000. The company's
accounting methods "were later found to be noncompliant with federal regulations."

According to Asahi Shimbun's report based on litigation documents, the company used
loans and capital to purchase used apartments. Investors then declared a smaller
income by adding the property depreciation deficits and other deficits together with the
main company's profits. Kyodo reported that in 2005, tax authorities informed the
investors that they would need to pay additional taxes."

India's National ID Database With Private Information Of
Nearly 1.2 Billion People Was Reportedly Breached:

"In 2010 India started scanning personal details like names, addresses, dates of birth,
mobile numbers, and more, along with all 10 fingerprints and iris scans of its 1.3 billion
citizens, into a centralized government database called Aadhaar to create a voluntary
identity system. On Wednesday this database was reportedly breached.

The Tribune, a local Indian newspaper, published a report claiming its reporters paid Rs.
500 (approximately $8) to a person who said his name was Anil Kumar, and who they
contacted through WhatsApp. Kumar was able to create a username and password that
gave them access to the demographic information of nearly 1.2 billion Indians who have
currently enrolled in Aadhaar, simply by entering a person’s unique 12-digit Aadhaar
number. Regional officers working with the Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI), the government agency responsible for Aadhaar, told the Tribune the access
was “illegal,” and a “major national security breach.”"

Equifax says more private data was stolen in 2017
breach than first revealed:

"Hackers stole more data from Equifax in a breach last year than initially thought.

In September, the Atlanta, GA-based credit giant revealed a huge data breach, including
names, social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and in some cases
driver's license numbers. It was later confirmed over 145 million were affected, primarily
Americans, but also some Canadians and British citizens.

The hack became the largest single data breach reported in 2017.

But documents seen by members of the Senate Banking Committee suggest the types of
data stolen were wider than the company first reported."

Personal Information of 340 Million People and
Businesses Leaked By Florida Marketing Firm:

"A little-known, Florida-based marketing firm called Exactis may be responsible for a
significant amount of personal data being exposed. According to a report from Wired,
the firm left 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server that any
person could have gotten ahold of.

The leak was discovered earlier this month by security researcher Vinny Troia, founder of
the New York-based security firm Night Lion Security. He reported his find to the FBI and
Exactis earlier this week, and while the company has since protected the data, it’s
unclear just how long it sat exposed.

So just how bad is the leak? It’s pretty bad! The data stored on the server amounts to
about two terabytes worth of personal information."

Hackers help themselves to data belonging to
2 million T-Mobile customers:

"T-Mobile has reported a security incident which may have led to the exposure of
personal data belonging to approximately two million customers.

In a statement, the telecommunications giant said on Thursday that a recent "incident"
may have given a cyberattacker brief access to customer records.

On August 20, T-Mobile staff detected an unauthorized entry into the company's
network. While the intrusion was rapidly shut down, customer names, billing ZIP codes,
phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account types are believed to
be involved in the data breach."

Google Reportedly Bought Your Banking Data in Secret,
and That's Not Even the Bad News:

"In a post-capitalistic world that seems very specifically and violently designed to rip
off the poor for the benefit of the rich, spending money is complicated. But at least,
until recently, you could live without fear that some multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley
giant would buy up your banking data in order to serve you more effective ads. Based
on new details about an apparent arrangement between Google and Mastercard, those
days are over.

Bloomberg reports that, after four years of negotiations, Google purchases a trove of
credit card transaction data from Mastercard, allegedly for “millions of dollars.” Google
then reportedly used that data to provide select advertisers with a tool called “store
sales measurement” that the company quietly announced in a blog post last year,
though it failed to mention the inclusion of Mastercard data in the workflow. The tool
can track how online ads lead to real-world purchases, and that extra data is designed
to make Google’s ad products more appealing to advertisers. (Read: everybody makes
more money this way.) The public was not informed of the reported Mastercard deal,
though advertisers have had access to the transaction data for at least a year,
according to Bloomberg.

This is a hell of a bombshell, when you think about it. Thanks in part to heavy
government regulation, your credit card and banking data has long been private. If
you wanted to spend $98 at Sephora on a Tuesday afternoon, that transaction was
between you, your bank, and Sephora. It now appears that Google has found a way to
weasel its way into the data pipeline that connects consumers and their purchases. If
you clicked on a Sephora ad while logged in to Google in the past year and then
bought stuff at Sephora with a Mastercard in the past year, there’s a chance Google
knows about that, at least on some level, and uses that data help its advertisers stuff
their coffers.

But when you consider everything else that Google knows about you, the proposition
becomes more Orwellian. Google told Gizmodo in a statement, also shared with
Bloomberg, that it encrypts and anonymizes the credit card transaction data that it’s
using with the new ad tool. There’s no getting around the fact that Google becomes a
more powerful, all-seeing ad engine when it can see specific details about people’s
spending habits, even if they’re anonymized and used in aggregate, as Google says
the data it gets from Mastercard is. This future—one where your email, your search
history, your social connections, and now, your spending habits—is one that we should
really be scared of, say privacy advocates."

"Following a massive data breach first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, Google
announced today that it is shutting down its social network Google+ for consumers. The
company finally admitted that Google+ never received the broad adoption or
engagement with users that it had hoped for -- according to a blog post, 90 percent of
Google+ user sessions last for less than five seconds. In light of these newly revealed
security concerns with Google+'s API, the company has opted to put it out of its misery
rather than try and make the social network more secure."

"At the end of last month, Facebook made a bombshell disclosure: As many as 90 million
of its users may have had their so-called access tokens—which keep you logged into
your account, so you don't have to sign in every time—stolen by hackers. Friday, the
company put the actual number at 30 million. Here's how to see if you were one of
them, and if so, what the hackers got from your account."